dionysusaur:You know, OpenOffice is pretty good. And pretty compatible. And free.Sadly, there's nobody to sue, so corporate IT departments won't go for it.

Every year I try to use OpenOffice. And every year I stop using it after the first crash. Which was after about 35 minutes a few months ago. These days I've stopped using MS Word (Windows and Mac) and I generally use a simple text editor or -hell- pages to write papers these days. People are waking up to the fact they don't need the bloated beast that is MS Office or OpenOffice. Simple and stable is better.

Quantum Apostrophe:dready zim: Quantum Apostrophe: When you have an economy that's based both on continuous growth and yet promotes automation, what's left to do?

Automate continuous growth?

Actually that sounds like a good idea.

And yet we still work 40 hours a week, often both people in a couple need to. They didn't 40 years ago. Why is this? Either we're all so productive but someone is stealing it, or we're not producing anything of value.

dready zim:Quantum Apostrophe: dready zim: Quantum Apostrophe: When you have an economy that's based both on continuous growth and yet promotes automation, what's left to do?

Automate continuous growth?

Actually that sounds like a good idea.

And yet we still work 40 hours a week, often both people in a couple need to. They didn't 40 years ago. Why is this? Either we're all so productive but someone is stealing it, or we're not producing anything of value.

dionysusaur:Quantum Apostrophe: dready zim: Quantum Apostrophe: When you have an economy that's based both on continuous growth and yet promotes automation, what's left to do?

Automate continuous growth?

Actually that sounds like a good idea.

And yet we still work 40 hours a week, often both people in a couple need to. They didn't 40 years ago. Why is this? Either we're all so productive but someone is stealing it, or we're not producing anything of value.

Why not both?

I'm an electronics hardware engineer. I used to create products that went to production with version B or C. Now I create paperwork trying to get offshored teams to create products that might work at version L. With no benefits (COBRA$ ftl::COBRA existing ftw), no holidays, no sick days.

gingerjet:dionysusaur: You know, OpenOffice is pretty good. And pretty compatible. And free.Sadly, there's nobody to sue, so corporate IT departments won't go for it.

Every year I try to use OpenOffice. And every year I stop using it after the first crash. Which was after about 35 minutes a few months ago. These days I've stopped using MS Word (Windows and Mac) and I generally use a simple text editor or -hell- pages to write papers these days. People are waking up to the fact they don't need the bloated beast that is MS Office or OpenOffice. Simple and stable is better.

/corporate IT departments want stability and predictability

You've crashed OpenOffice? How? I'm curious - I've been using it for five or six years, on both Windows and Linux platforms, and have never managed that.

Quantum Apostrophe:And yet we still work 40 hours a week, often both people in a couple need to. They didn't 40 years ago. Why is this? Either we're all so productive but someone is stealing it, or we're not producing anything of value.

Inflation combined with the new way inflation is measured1 combined with increases in wages that do not match the actual inflation.

Number 1 is bad, number 2 makes it worse, and number 3 is the kick while you are down.

What we need is a nice bit of deflation. Sure, your debt will increase in absolute value (you can buy more with the money than when you started the debt) but inflation farks the debt provider, his money was worth more before he went and lend it to someone. Inflation and deflation depending on the actual market would balance each other out and the interest rate on the debt wouldn't need to be half as high to get a profit on the debt.

Prices for 3 products since the 100s in Euro. Let's focus on the important items. Beer, per litre. Ham, per kilo. Beef (from the ribs), also per kilo. Just look at the prices, per unit the prices fluctuate a bit but they never get too high or too low. Now we get to to 20th century. We get central banks which have as task to keep inflation low (and even prevent deflation). Did the actual wages increase by 14000% (beer) or 2500% (ham) or 3100% (beef) since 1800? Unfortunatly I can't find the wages of a 1800s person so we'll look at the 2000 - 2011 period. Looking at the total private, multiple person household incomes we notice that betw een 2000 and 2011 there was an increase in income from 4542 to 4737, or 4.3%. Now we look at the price of the products again.Item - percentage price changePotatoes 31,75Beer 19,66Bread 0,00Ham 7,21Cheese 32,67Chicken eggs 14,29Coffee 32,47Margarine 23,62Milk 31,37Beef -0,92Rice -17,45Butter 6,42Sugar -10,23Tea 1,28

An average price increase of 12%, with high demand items as coffee, potatoes, meat and eggs seeing the largest increases. Yay, inflation was kept low... yet still you have less and less money. Also debt, debt isn't helping either. People who'd get by are now pushed to poverty by the interest payments.

1)instead of getting the price of the product you get the price of a product that would substitute the first product. So the steak you used to buy is getting expensive so they factor out the steak and input a hamburger. That way your food spending remains the same and no inflation happened. Also: taxes often aren't included in the inflation figure. So increase taxes, reduce spending money yet no inflation happened.

nytmare:It's been my experience that every time a company claims they're moving to a regular update schedule, it fails to materialize. These execs don't understand that improvements and creativity don't happen on a schedule.

Not only that, but just how much is there to improve? These types of programs are among the oldest in existence and have probably been used more than anything else, my hunch is that they're plenty refined by now.

pyrotek85:nytmare: It's been my experience that every time a company claims they're moving to a regular update schedule, it fails to materialize. These execs don't understand that improvements and creativity don't happen on a schedule.

Not only that, but just how much is there to improve? These types of programs are among the oldest in existence and have probably been used more than anything else, my hunch is that they're plenty refined by now.

Microsoft is basically trying to edge Office into a world where people work on the go. Skydrive integration is pretty extensive in 2013 and documents can be edited pretty thoroughly on Windows Phone devices.

If people don't feel like they need it, fine, but this idea that Microsoft is just doing this to gouge you at this point is a little absurd. The subscription model isn't a bad idea, either.

Dinki:"We already have the mechanisms in place to update the service on a quarterly basis." The quick updates should make subscribing to Office 365 more appealing to consumers

Yes, because that secretary that is quite happy with her 5 year old copy of Word 2007 will just love all those unnecessary 'improvements' you guys throw into each update. Especially when those updates break something that worked perfectly fine before.

M$ has a lot of middle management that has to justify their pay checks. I don't really mind ribbons in Office. However, how much more tweaking does that interface need. Whoopee, it connects to skydrive...

I sell MSFT Dynamics CRM (customization and implementation services), and the new Roll Up 12 for CRM 2011 has broken so much shiat. It's interface looks like the new Office 2013. We've got customers FREAKING THE FARK OUT because of how many changes there were. The update has broken customized workflows, reporting features, etc.

Thank God I am not on the services side of things.

This, it has made my job a LIVING HELL for the last 6 weeks.... fark MS and fark EVERYTHING YOU DO....currently have a copy of the office 2010 installer on a usb stick locked in a firesafe...the thought of the MD having to learn MORE interface, is just mindbogglingly scary.

Flint Ironstag:I think the top management at Microsoft is actually secretly working for Apple and is deliberately working to destroy MS from within. Windows 8 (a great OS ruined by a stupid and counterintuitive Metro interface), the new Word licence that you can only install it one one PC ever, ribbons on everything and now this?

The vast majority of people who use Word and Excel are office drones who barley know how to rename a file. They have been trained like performing seals how to do certain tasks and that is what they do day after day. Changing the interface, the location of buttons, the layout of menus etc will fark them up big time. To them "the internet" is "the big E on the screen" and trying to get them to understand that Firefox or, god help them, Chrome, can do the same thing is nigh on impossible unless you use the IE icon and just edit the destination to Firefox.

This so much. My current position is with tech support. I had someone that changed the default wifi info on a new router they just got from us. They did not know what a browser was or what I meant by the icon they click on to open the internet. I shipped them off to a paid service because I doubt they would have been able to handle inputting an ip address and going through some simple screens. I also am convinced that they have pressed the WPS button whenever their is a problem because they think it is the Easy Button.

While the ribbon requires a change of thinking at first, at the end of the day it makes more functions and features discoverable more easily and organizes everything better.

Only if people put in the time and effort to deal with the ribbons. The only reason msft put the ribbons on every product is so that they looked updated and modern. Having the same drop down functionality since before Clinton smoked special scented cigars is not a bad thing to have in a product. If the UI works, don't break it. If you want to add some more functionality, add on top of it.

But man am I tired of all the whining about office etc, how hard is it to learn something new? And the number of people who equate new with bad is scary.

Ahh someone who's never worked a day in their lives telling people to get over it. Welcome to the internet, smells like pre-pubescent children.

If you arbitrarily change something I need to earn a living for the single reason of 'to be hip and happening', I will be pissed at YOU for changing it. Especially when your hip & happening changes break my workflow and indeed the logical placement of controls for the software I'm using.

Once your an adult and working for a living you'll understand that. Until then STFU.

I'd like to field that question if I may. We swapped antiquated Goldmine for Dynamics....It's literally been a clusterfark from beginning to end....it misses out so many basic features and what there is is so inconsistent...For example, any business has a variety of tasks to keep track of clients, phone calls, faxes, emails etc etc...so it should be simple to create a workflow that fills in a field that tells me when a contact was last contacted.....so I can drive another workflow that alerts me to who isn't being contacted....Small problem, MS don't implement dates for emails but they do for everything else so it's impossible to do.The outlook email tracking is haphazard at best, and completely useless at worst.The new Polaris update is totally unconfigurable,doesn't display all the activities, generates unfixable script errors that even MS can't solve (we aren't running any scripts whatsoever) when viewing certain contacts in outlookOh and it keeps expanding and from 80% storage plus it emails you every night to pester you to buy more storage...to EVERY adminIf I think of anything more ill be back.

Oh one more thing the support desk...Microsoft in their wisdom are merging 365 and Dynamics...Small problem, no ones actually BOTHERED to tell either team. For instance for some reason even though I'm included in the email, largely when I'm CC'd in, I don't get the email in my inbox/on my phone..but it DOES appear in unread mail.O365 say its dynamics doing it, dynamics say its o365. But how the fark can I have trust in Microsoft when they can't even get an email to me!!!!It's pathetic, the systems don't integrate and yet they persist...which brings me to the Polaris update again. MS rolled it out to on premise, realised it broke a LOT of stuff...so pulled it from the download centre.

Now this is where i start to get really farked off....they then rolled it out to the cloud version...BEFORE they had fixed it. What sort of farking company does that? Especially in a version that has NO ABILITY TO ROLLBACK THE UPDATE...

Office Worker: My job is to create a productive product my company can sell. Learning the IT Tech's job, the OS and applications is a collateral. A collateral duty made much worse because the lazy IT folks who think that all I have to do is learn their job. Then there are the productivity killers like Microsoft cultivate the market by constantly changing the interface of their products.